An exploration of ultracoffee, radiation safety, and more often than not a beer or two.
Only a few of you failed out of counter-terrorism theater club: when you are handed select choices to investigate, the money wants you to investigate those. The money does not appreciate when you question their premises/choices or study things they didn’t pay you to consider. [The twenty fifth in an ongoing series of my compiled …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Murder By Nuclide”
When enough people ask the same question, it’s probably time to write down an answer, especially when your mom asks. And it’s this: “Will you be raising your BBotE prices because of Trump’s tariffs? How much?” ANSWER: Not at this time, nor can I even guess how much of an increase might be needed if …
I have often described myself as a human giftschrank. That I keep ahold of the poisonous knowledge that others need to forget to have a happy life, but that it is important to keep around for when we need it. When someone needs to “rediscover” some horrible event to bring cautionary tales back to everyone …
Man, I could have sworn I wrote down a description of Antique Rot before. When a undiversified town loses it’s economic base, it also loses it’s youth to new opportunities elsewhere. The town and it’s population are now aging and dying. One of the ways to hang on for a little bit longer, maybe squeeze …
Fine. FINE! After the who knows how manyeth time of being asked or having someone referred to me, I am writing this down for ease of reference to just point at. TL;DR version – It’s perfectly safe to possess Fiestaware & uranium glass in your home and to consume food or drink that isn’t acidic with/from/on …
It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap …
For folks that haven’t been lucky enough to experience the “Phil Points At Things That Aren’t There Anymore” Manhattan Project Tour of Berkeley, there is a secondary bit of education that comes courtesy of having 160 years worth of chemistry buildings still standing to point at. I similarly do this for students when getting them …
Continue reading “Evolution Of Safety Equipment – The Berkeley Box”
People who believe they have True Ultimate Power want nice, simple, sound bite executable solutions that obliterate nuance and complications with BOLD & DECISIVE ACTION. Were those actions good and appropriate? Ehhhhhh. [The twenty-third in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Kneejerk Spent Fuel Solutions”
Last year, my friend Ed made a post regarding the nascent proliferation of ChatGPT and competitors into various search engines and other products. With a moment’s contemplation after reading it, I just realized how spectacularly bad this could go if, for example, you went to do a search for an chemical’s Material Safety Data Sheet …
Per the Catholic Church, and other denominations that notionally agree with their calendar, it’s Holy Week. Pretty much every day in from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday has a special name. For example, as I write this, today is Fig Tuesday because important fig related things happened today in the life of Jesus. Tomorrow is …
When you hand me an incident report and you list “training issues” as a root cause, you just told me that I need to pay MUCH CLOSER ATTENTION to management and the person that wrote this report. Why? Let’s take a moment to look at the Safety Professional’s Blessed Cosmology. Training sits in Administrative Controls. …
Having now had a chance to take a look at the likely culprit, assuming a repetition of the previous incident, all I can say is You Completely Irresponsible Fucks. I am having flashbacks to yelling at Naomi Wu for irresponsible deployment of germicidal UV designs in 2020. I am gonna try to very briefly summarize …
Because people were missing the CYORAs and something popped into my head, you got the first one in quite a while. Moving radioactive rocks around is important because it lets us revisit one of my favorite topics: Regulations vs. Reality vs. What Actually Happens [The twenty-second in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for …
There’s a hard philosophical conflict in emergency preparedness that goes like this: do you want to build capabilities to respond to an incident or do you want to prevent it from happening in the first place? You need both, but they tend to compete for the same pot of money. [The twenty-first in an ongoing …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Anti-Terror Money”
I think he best way to start this is by shaking my ANGRYFIST at Amazon & eBay for being the gray/black markets of choice for all manner of things that should not be there. Bullshit Lasers only scratch the surface of their almost complete lack of policy enforcement. [The twentieth in an ongoing series of …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Rad Presents”
